In Praise of Forgiveness. Massimo Recalcati
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and is equally matched by the contempt for her lover, which seems paradoxically to feed it. Antonia is clearly split: the tenderness of her husband is as impossible to give up as the transgressive erotic charge that she finds in the other man. In this way, her life appears to be afflicted by the very split pinpointed by Freud as the paradigm of degradation in the male love life. The hard-earned sexual freedom of women thus risks following the missteps taken by the male neuroses: experiencing one’s partner as a limit, aspiring to a bond that goes beyond the family unit as the only experience of practising one’s own sexual desire in a vital and non-repetitive way.
But there are many variations on the Freudian framework. For example, one man in analysis told me of his need to cheat on his wife, whom he declared he loved deeply. In this case, the libidinal and erotic value of this couple’s sex life had remained intact after many years of marriage. At play here was not, then, the classic disarticulation of emotional life and erotic passion, of the flow of tenderness and that of sexual desire. Rather, it appeared evident that the condition that had preserved the sexual understanding and family love in this couple was the very reason this man had always cheated on his wife. In this way, he would repeatedly make her a lost object and, therefore, extremely desirable. He required the existence of a lover in order to de-complete his wife, rendering her lacking and therefore activating her once more as a subject of desire emancipated from the family routine.3
Resignation or Dopamine?
Couples separate, marriages fail, the length of bonds is shortened: this is a fact. The birth of a child often coincides in particular with a crisis in the bond on both sides. The man has trouble locating the woman with whom he fell in love in the woman who has become a mother, and the woman, identifying the man as the father of her family, remains sexually unsatisfied and searches for the object capable of resuscitating her erotic desire in an other.4 Psychoanalytic practice can offer infinite examples of this tendency. But its basis lies in the falsehood that today endorses the equivalence between the New and happiness. This lie forces us to live in desperate search of the New with the (false) supposition that in the New we will find full self-realization. The ridiculing of loving pathos towards the absolute, the promise of lovers that it will be ‘forever’, not only comes from cynical disenchantment, but also and most significantly from the social imperative of the New and its explosive combination with a reductively machine-like version of the human being that scientific research seems to corroborate. An eloquent example of this is given by the great biologist and neuroscientist Robin Dunbar when he reminds us, rapidly cooling the boiling spirits of naïve lovers who experience a kiss with romantic abandon, that the kiss is probably, more than anything else, a test of the health and genetics of future partners. That it concerns health is obvious because poor health often results in bad breath and an acidic taste in the mouth, two things that are easily ascertained when we kiss.5
The point is that in our time the difficulty of uniting sexual enjoyment with love, which as we have seen was considered by Freud to be the most common neurosis in any love life, has become emblematic of a truth that seems undeniable: desire is destined to die if its object is not constantly renewed, if we do not change partner, if it is closed for too long in the restrictive chamber of the same bond. The proliferation of divorce and separations seems to support this truth beyond any doubt. It is beyond discussion. In a long-term conjugal bond, or even when simply living together, the erotic urge of desire is destined at the very least to grow numb, if not to disappear altogether. The materialistic cynicism of modern hyper-hedonism seems to find support in the most advanced scientific research. Falling in love is much like doping, its effects destined to fade in the space of a few months (between three and eighteen, apparently). In a loving encounter, the areas of the brain that deal with judgement and critical analysis are clouded by a rise in dopamine, the hormone that activates our most irrational and euphoric urges. But this cloud is time-limited and must either evolve into a state of monogamous calm, as promoted by the activation of oxytocin receptors, or feverishly revive itself through a new encounter.6
Faced with this cynical, scientific demolition of love, it seems there are two remaining options: to accept the inevitable corruption of the bond and regularly change partners in order to revitalize one’s own love life (a change that can also lead to a parallel love life being maintained, as is the case with affairs), or to resign oneself to a life without desire, to the monotony of the family charade, guaranteeing oneself monogamous emotional security as a counterpart to the acceptance of the mortal desiccation of desire.
But are these really the only paths we can follow? Can psychoanalysis accept that the loving discourse be reduced to the vacuous metonymy of desire or the disenchanted resignation to the boredom provided by the reality principle? Does this not fall short of its critical mission, that of refusing any conformist accommodation of desire?
We must be clear that our times are not the same as those experienced by Freud. Back then, psychoanalysis had made a significant critical contribution to the deconstruction of the romantic Ideal of love, demonstrating how this Ideal was often a cover for the obscene, unspeakable real of the drive. It was therefore used to unmake love as an artificial Ideal that ended up imposing a straitjacket on the unconscious power of desire. The suspicions of the psychoanalyst revealed how greed and affirmation of the Ego went hand in hand with all altruistic sentiment, like a heavy shadow, including that of love. This is a thesis that we find not only in Freud but in the majority of reflections, even the most recent, made by psychoanalysts on the subject of love. Love is a trick, the effect of a temporary blindness that leads us to mistake the other for our ideal Ego.7 The truth is that the urge of the drive reduces the value of the object to a mere instrument of its own demand for satisfaction. What counts is the satisfaction of the drive, to which the particular existence of the object is entirely indifferent. This is one of Freud’s theories that demonstrates the entirely secondary (‘variable’) character of the beloved object: the drive demands the satisfaction of the One, who is not at all interested in the fate of the Other.8
Narcissistic Love
The heretical moment foretold by psychoanalysis contains within it a rightful demand: to demonstrate the extent to which narcissistic love is an illusion that does not feed the bond with the Other, but that reinforces the Ego’s passionate, one-way devotion to itself. When I say ‘I love you’, I am also saying ‘I love myself through you.’ Freud is clear on this point: when I choose to love the Other, I choose to love the person who represents the ideal image of my Ego. Love can have many sides and one of these is without doubt that of a scam, of blindness, of suggestion, of hypnosis, of narcissistically falling in love.9
Today, this act of unmasking the loving Ideal has ended up fatally colluding with the hyper-hedonistic cynicism of the capitalist discourse. Psychoanalysis has unwittingly served the new master – the capitalist discourse – which decrees love to be an illusion, whilst insisting that what counts in life is the acquisition of the highest possible quota of enjoyment. It is also for this reason that the time has come for psychoanalysis to say something more on love. If this disenchantment has come from the dominant ideology that dismisses everything beyond the closed horizon of the Ego as naïve belief and pure misrecognition, then psychoanalysis needs to rediscover the role it plays in sustaining critical social theory, recovering the dimension of love as absolute exposure, as an irreducible and unique point of resistance in the face of the cynical and narcissistic bent that feeds the capitalist discourse. This means revaluating psychoanalysis, seeing it as a possible discourse on love that cannot be absorbed by either the libertine worship of desire without ties or the bourgeois resignation to lifeless routine, rather than solely as a force that deconstructs the loving Ideal. Is it not up to psychoanalysis, today more than ever, to endorse once more the dimension of love in its absolute risk? Should psychoanalysis itself not wager the existence of a new love, a ‘new love’ capable, as Lacan would have said, of making desire (as a demand for love that makes the loved one unique and irreplaceable) and enjoyment (as the urge of an erotic body of drive) converge with love rather than dissociate from it?